I think the there are better alternatives for backup like kopia and restic. Even seafile. Want protection against ransomware, storage compression, encryption, versioning, sync upon write and block deduplication.
this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2025
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I used to use rsnapshot, which is a thin wrapper around rsync to make it incremental, but moved to restic and never looked back. Much easier and encrypted by default.
Surely restic or borg would be better for backups?
Rsync can send files and not delete stuff, but there's no versioning or retention settings.
If you add --delete-before, it absolutely can delete stuff.
Yeah but then it's not really a good backup!
Duplicity also works really well for backups and you can encrypt them with your own openpgp key.
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(5 replies)
Maybe I am missing something but how does it handle snapshots?
I use rsync all the time but only for moving data around effectively. But not for backups as it doesn't (AFAIK) hanld snapshots
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rsync for backups? I guess it depends on what kind of backup
for redundant backups of my data and configs that I still have a live copy of, I use restic, it compresses extremely well
I have used rsync to permanently move something to another drive though
If you're trying to back up Windows OS drives for some reason, robocopy works quite similarly to rsync.
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Rsync is great. I’ve been using it to back up my book library from my local Calibre collection to my NAS for years, it’s absurdly simple and convenient. Plus, -ruv lets me ignore unchanged files and backup recursively, and if I clean up locally and need that replicated, just need to add —delete.
Grsync is great. Having a GUI can be helpful